Officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation last summer assembled a summary of more than a dozen tips received by the agency involving President Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, according to emails released by the Department of Justice on Friday.
It is unclear why the investigators assembled the summary, which includes accusations of sexual abuse by Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump. The emails did not include any corroborating evidence and The New York Times is not describing the details of the unverified claims.
The emails summarized tips sent to the F.B.I.’s National Threat Operations Center in West Virginia, which fields a large volume of calls from around the country, allowing members of the public to submit crime tips to the agency.
The emails do not state when the tips were received. Some of the alleged incidents refer to tips for which underlying documents have been previously released by the government.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said at a news conference on Friday that the White House had no involvement in the review of Epstein documents. He also said there was no material in the files that would prompt additional prosecutions.
In response to a request for comment, the White House referred to a public statement from the Justice Department, which stated that Friday’s documents “may include fake or falsely submitted images, documents or videos.” It also said that some of the documents contain false claims against President Trump that were submitted to the F.B.I. before the 2020 election.
Links to the emails, which were posted with millions of other Epstein-related documents on the Department of Justice’s website on Friday morning, stopped working for a few hours but were then restored.
A Justice Department spokeswoman said the document in question was down “due to overload.”
In a previous release last month, Justice Department officials posted, then took down, an image of many photographs, including a picture of Mr. Trump, on a credenza. Department officials said they took it down to make sure it did not include images of any victims, and then reposted the image in its online library of Epstein documents.
A second summary in the same email chain released on Friday, which also included tips send to the office of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, suggested that investigators had followed up on at least some of the tips. Notes indicated that some tips lacked credibility. Some of the tipsters did not provide contact information for investigators.
The document logs efforts to investigate some of the tips. But the names of the tipsters were redacted, as were entries in a column in the second document marked “criminal history.” It is unclear what the final disposition of the department’s follow-up efforts were.
Nicholas Confessore is New York-based political and investigative reporter for The Times and a staff writer at the Times Magazine, covering power and influence in Washington, tech, media and beyond. He can be reached at [email protected].
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